JAN. 6 PANEL HINTS AT NEW REVELATIONS
Hearing planned for today delayed due to ‘technical issues’
A day after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Eric Herschmann, a White House lawyer, received an unexpected call from the conservative lawyer John Eastman, who had been working with President Donald Trump to try to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
To Herschmann’s surprise — even after the deadly riot — Eastman was still pushing to fight the election results, an effort that resulted in mayhem and violence. Herschmann cut him off. “I’m going to give you the best free legal advice you’re ever getting in your life,” he recalled telling Eastman before recommending he find a criminal defense lawyer, adding, “You’re going to need it.”
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol released video of Herschmann’s testimony as it previewed a hearing Thursday in which the panel plans to delve into the pressure campaign Trump and Eastman waged against Vice President Mike Pence as they tried to persuade him to throw out legitimate electoral votes for Joe Biden to keep Trump in power.
“President Trump had no factual basis for what he was doing, and he had been told it was illegal,” Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the vice chair of the committee, said in a video previewing the hearing.
Thursday’s hearing is expected to include potentially important revelations about the steps Trump and his allies took to try to compel his vice president to overturn the election.
J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former judge who advised the vice president, is scheduled to testify. Luttig advised Pence that Trump’s idea that the vice president could unilaterally decide to invalidate election results was unconstitutional and that he should not go along with the plan.
Also scheduled to appear is Greg Jacob, Pence’s top White House lawyer, who has provided the committee with crucial evidence about the role played by Eastman, who wrote a memo that members of both parties have described as a blueprint for a coup.
Eastman advised Trump that Pence could throw out electoral votes from states he had lost, though he conceded during a conversation with Jacob that his arguments carried no legal weight and would fail before the Supreme Court.
As the mob attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 — some of them chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” — Jacob sent an email to Eastman at 12:14 p.m. blaming him for the violence.
“It was gravely, gravely irresponsible for you to entice the president with an academic theory that had no legal viability,” Jacob wrote in a subsequent email to Eastman.
The committee could also hear testimony about Trump’s state of mind during the violence.
Cheney said last week that the panel had received testimony that when Trump learned of the mob’s threats to hang Pence, he said, “Maybe our supporters have the right idea,” and added that Pence “deserves it.”
The committee could also hear testimony that a day before the mob violence, Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, grew so concerned about Trump’s actions that he presented a warning to a Secret Service agent: The president was going to publicly turn against the vice president, and there could be a security risk to Pence because of it.
The committee on Tuesday postponed a hearing that was scheduled for today to lay out its findings about Trump’s attempt to use the Justice Department to overturn the 2020 election.
“It’s just technical issues,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, a member of the committee. She said that for staff aides who were compiling a series of videos to be showcased at the session, “it was overwhelming, so we’re trying to give them a little room.”